My trash writing, Frantz Fanon and Paul Beatty
I set up this blog out of frustration. I had written something, which I thought had some value, but I couldn’t seem to get it published. Not without mutilating it. This has happened over, and over again, and I’d grown tired of arguing with gatekeepers over the inconsistencies and shifting standards they were using to keep me out.
That’s less narcissistic than it might sound. This doesn’t just happen to me. Way too often, the work of far too many people is rejected under the guise of judgements concerning good work. That is, for many of us, especially those of us who don’t neatly fit into the categories and the understanding of those in decision making positions, the unfamiliarity of our bodies and lived experiences often leads to our work being judged lacking. The choice we are then confronted with is to conform, or to stay out. I didn’t want to conform.
Interestingly enough, after posting it on this platform, my article was subsequently picked up elsewhere1. I planned to keep blogging, but I then got busy teaching, adjusting to Zoom’s takeover of my professional life, and managing the emotional fallout of COVID isolation and #BLM protests continuing to go unheeded. I should have kept blogging. I used to blog regularly2. I’d like to get back into it, and this is a really good place to do that, despite my reticence to share my views publicly.
That may sound strange. My best attempt to express that reticence, to date, is a fragment that I abandoned years ago. It’s a terrible piece of writing, but it’s important to me for two reasons. First, going over and over that piece, working at it again and again but realising that it was still trash, helped me to realise that I’m no novelist or fiction writer. That’s just not my lane. And yet, secondly, terrible as it is, that piece contains something precious - a kernel of truth.
I’ll show you what I mean. Here’s the fragment:
“How do you tell someone something they don't want to hear? What if one day, someone came to you and said that the sky wasn't blue, nor water wet; that pain wasn't bitter and misery was really sweet?”
“A child might be intrigued, but you... What happens when you, whose world is as alien as sweet misery, are asked by someone who belongs to this one, to explain yourself? Where do you start? Do you just paint a picture they can recognise, no matter how distorted? Do you keep your respectability and stay in the fold? Or do you come to terms with your unintelligibility and consequent irrelevance?”
Even as he spoke the words, he knew what they were thinking. The old man knew life would be so much simpler if he just followed his own advice and kept silent. He was the sensible one. He knew full well what happens when you stray. The greatest wrong, when living in a mad-house, is to have the presumption to be anything but mad yourself. He knew that better than most. And yet... And yet some valve inside him failed.
Despite his desire to squeeze it shut, some sphincter inside was growing increasingly redundant. He just couldn't keep the words in. So against his better judgement, against all he knew to be sensible, and wise, and most important, key to survival, he had begun to speak. He knew that just as the initial drip of the tap whose washer is worn will inevitably turn into an unrestrained flow, so too would words eventually escape him, and that to his ruin. Lately, every time he opened his mouth, he came closer and closer to accusing them, and by that, condemning himself.
That writing is almost a decade old. The sphincter imagery is unfortunate, to say the least. I don’t know what I was thinking. To be clear, I have enjoyed academic play with the scatalogical (most explicitly in works on African philosophy3,4 - an observation which warrants scrutiny down the track), so my issue isn’t with obscenity5. Here though, it’s just “extra,” as is the opening dialogue. That said, I really was trying to make sense of something. I was echoing a sentiment that I would later read in Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks: ‘The Black must no longer be confronted with this dilemma: whiten yourself or disappear, but must be able to grasp consciousness of a possibility to exist’6.
Interestingly, I recently read Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle again, this time with a group of colleagues. I wonder if Beatty might not reply to Fanon that the Black is confronted with that dilemma, with a police flashlight turned on her for good measure; and that disappearing might not be a bad idea. Regarding this surveillance, Beatty writes brilliantly:
Speaking of suffering, I think Scoby is going insane. The scrutiny he is undergoing is unbelievable […] The philosophers are easily the most despicable of the lot. I suppose they have the most to lose. Every other scientist can say, “Well, it is at least possible” (they haven’t accepted that he is never, ever going to miss), but Socrates never said nothing about a motherfucker like Scoby. Nick’s thrown every theory, every formula, every philosophical dogma out of whack; he’s like a living disclaimer. “I am perfection; everything else is bullshit. Your life is meaningless.” So the philosophers show up at the games, full of anticipatory schadenfreude […] Invariably, Scoby goes six for six and leaves them in tears, cursing epistemology. They would be better off if they simply called Scoby a god and left it at that, but no way they’ll proclaim a skinny black man God7.
My interpretation of Beatty here is that Nick Scoby’s excellence not only perplexes the white establishment, it throws their world out of sync. Similarly, that piece of writing that Reviewer 2 or the commissioning editor decides is unpublishable is unpublishable because its acceptance would overturn far too much precedent. It would call into question the grounds on which everything to date has been accepted and rejected; and the grounds of said reviewer or editor’s authority. Accepting our work would be tantamount to proclaiming ‘a skinny black man God’.
Here, I think Beatty and Fanon cross paths. As Fanon points out, the white (the colonial master) ‘scorns the consciousness of the slave. What he wants is not recognition but work’8. Beatty illustrates and surpasses this Fanonian observation:
Scoby’s eyes reddened and he started to sniffle. He was cracking under the pressure. Watching his hands shake, I realised that sometimes the worst thing a nigger can do is perform well. Because there is no turning back. We have no place to hide […] Successful niggers can’t go back home and blithely disappear into the fold. “Tote that barge, shoot that basketball, lift that bale, nigger ain’t you ever heard of Dred Scott?”9
Fanon sees the breakdown of Hegel’s dialectic, where the extractive capitalist aspect of white supremacy means that the possibility of mutual recognition between Black and white falls by the wayside. For Beatty, there seems to be a different dialectic at play. The white supremacist structure refuses to acknowledge Scoby’s excellence. Its agents, exemplified by the philosophers, are agonised by displays of his brilliance. Yet at the same time, they extract value from him, exploit him, and insist that he continue to supply his labour to the enrichment of that white supremacist structure. Where Fanon laments being forced to disappear, Beatty’s Scoby yearns for it. Yet like Dred Scott, the enslaved man who tried to sue for the recognition of the fact that he met the requirements for emancipation, Scoby can’t just go home.
All of which is to say that hopefully, this blog becomes a place where I can work on my jump shot in peace … and maybe sometimes get to play with friends, on our terms.
Notes:
1 Philosophically thinking through COVID-19
2 Charlie Taylor. "'Irish Times' journalist wins blog award,” The Irish Times (2010, March 28). https://www.irishtimes.com/news/irish-times-journalist-wins-blog-award-1.855375
3 Bryan Mukandi, "Chester Himes, Jacques Derrida and inescapable colonialism: Reflections on African philosophy from the diaspora," Southern African Journal of Philosophy 34, no. 4 (2015), https://doi.org/10.1080/02580136.2015.1113821.
4 Bryan Mukandi, "Beyond Hermes: Metaphysics in a New Key," Utafiti: Journal of African Perspectives 14, no. 1 (2019), https://doi.org/10.1163/26836408-14010008.
5 Chelsea Bond, Bryan Mukandi & Shane Coghill, "‘You cunts can do as you like’: the obscenity and absurdity of free speech to Blackfullas," Continuum 32, no. 4 (2018), https://doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2018.1487126.
6 Frantz Fanon, Œuvres: Peau noire, masques blancs, L’An V de la révolution algérienne, Les Damnés de la terre, Pour la révolution africaine (Paris: La Découverte, 2011), 142, translation mine.
The original reads: « le Noir ne doit plus se trouver placé devant ce dilemme : se blanchir ou disparaître, mais il doit pouvoir prendre conscience d’une possibilité d’exister ».
7 Paul Beatty, The White Boy Shuffle (London: Oneworld Publications, 2017), 226-7.
8 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. by Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press), 195, fn. 10.
9 Paul Beatty, The White Boy Shuffle, 142.